Well, maybe I'm stretching here, but you could get a reputation as an idiot if you died too much. Mobs would make fun of you, bullies would pick on you.

Many of the options discussed on this thread so far seem to work... permadeath, forced afterlife journey, stat point loss, etc. Or, presumably your system has something that you build up, skills or something, you could lose some of that.

Have you decided not to have xp or equipment loss, or are you just looking for other ideas at the moment possibly in addition to those?

I am assuming permadeath is out. A non-level, non-class based MUD can still impose death penalties such as equipment damage/loss, temporary or permanent skill or attribute decay, temporary or permanent advancement penalties, reputation effects, fees for revival, etc.

Other, less standard, consequences have been mentioned such as zombies/ghosts/etc. of the slain character (maybe the restless dead even seek the death cheater out!), required quests to redeem yourself in the eyes of a faith (the risen dead may be "unclean", "cursed", etc.), maybe even revival as an undead type (crud, my arm fell off... again.). Dead characters may be sent for a stint in the underworld before they can revive.

Well, maybe I'm stretching here, but you could get a reputation as an idiot if you died too much. Mobs would make fun of you, bullies would pick on you.

Many of the options discussed on this thread so far seem to work... permadeath, forced afterlife journey, stat point loss, etc. Or, presumably your system has something that you build up, skills or something, you could lose some of that.

Have you decided not to have xp or equipment loss, or are you just looking for other ideas at the moment possibly in addition to those?

I like that idea a lot. It could work like a kill/death ratio, where more kills would make mobs nervous around them.

Looking for additional - or replacement - ideas. I really like this one.

The problem with most death systems is that they're viewed simply as a means of penalising the player. I would go so far as to say that there shouldn't be a single feature in the entire game that is unambiguously about penalising players (other than OOC punishments for OOC offences, of course). Instead, any game feature should be a) interesting, b) fun, and c) likely to involve tactical and/or strategic decisions with significant consequences.

Suggestions about some sort of "afterlife" game phase are heading in the right direction, IMO - it makes death a potentially interesting and fun piece of gameplay rather than simply an annoyance. But I'd like to see them taken farther, to the point where dying might, under certain circumstances, actually convey a strategic advantage on the player.

For example, suppose that, while dead and in the "other world", the player has the chance to harvest other souls which will boost his powers - not simply within the dead realm, but when he returns to the real world as well. But, balanced against that, a non-reincarnated dead soul loses (say) 1 experience point per heartbeat until it chooses to return to the living.

You now have a death mechanism that becomes an intrinsically interesting and tactical part of the game. A player might actually deliberately commit suicide because some combination of circumstances in the real world has led him to believe that he has the key to a rich vein of spiritual energy that can be tapped swiftly and efficiently before he is reincarnated. But, if that turns out to be wrong, and he is trapped in the spirit realm for longer than he expects, he will be weakened rather than strengthened when he returns to the real world.

Alternatively one could give interesting real-world abilities to disembodied ghosts. Perhaps ghosts could wander invisibly, walking through walls and locked doors at will. Perhaps they are disrupted or otherwise inconvenienced by sunlight. Perhaps high-level ghosts can have enough power to influence physical objects - even perhaps to slay the living by squeezing their hearts inside their chests. (Who's seen The Frighteners? ) Maybe, if a player is being pursued by a powerful, non-corporeal being, it is only by actually voluntarily dying and becoming a non-corporeal spirit himself that he is able to battle it!

The possibilities are endless, but I do think people need to stop thinking about death as "a punishment" and start thinking about it as a potentially interesting game feature.

The reason that death seems like a punishment is because it is. It's a way of telling players to be more careful. If nothing happened when they died, they'd just go on doing what it was that got them killed.
And even if you eliminate the harsher penalties for dying, you're still going to have SOME sort of penalty. If it takes 2 hours of fighting through beast after beast, and death only sends you back to recall, then it's still going to suck to die.
On the flip side, you can make death be rewarding for others who can resurrect the fallen character, who may avoid some - or all - of the penalties. The problem with that is that there is potential for abuse.

The reason that death seems like a punishment is because it is. It's a way of telling players to be more careful. If nothing happened when they died, they'd just go on doing what it was that got them killed.

What if they died from something that wasn't their fault? For example, PK? In that case you're allowing players to hand out "punishment" to other players, for any reason they wish.

I've seen PK muds where players have spent most of their time hiding in their bases, because they were too afraid to risk the penalties associated with death. This pretty much killed off the PK aspect of the mud.

Death can have a big penalty associated with it for reasons other than "It's my mud and I enjoy penalizing": the risk of the penalty makes life more interesting, and when you DON'T die and thus don't get penalized you feel like you've accomplished something.

We've found that, because of the way people view risk, a small random chance of a penalty is comparably effective to the certainty of a penalty. (At risk of derailing the thread, that's the theory behind the rl death penalty too!) That way we have less people actually being penalized; and we aren't particularly interested in everybody working full-time to recover from when they died, so that's a good outcome.

I've been thinking about a death system for a potential sci-fi mud. Throughout the game world, set up cloning facilities. At these facilities, players can pay to have an imprint of themselves stored (for a price, either static or increasing with power or frequence of use). The imprint would store base stats of the character and when the character dies, a fairly short scripted sequence would be run whereby the character wakes up in a cloning vat with the stats of their imprint, which can be used an unlimited number of times.

Large loss of stats from forgetting to imprint could be averted if you take the corpse back to the cloning lab. Give the character a bonus of 1/2 the difference in each stat or something.

The reason that death seems like a punishment is because it is. It's a way of telling players to be more careful. If nothing happened when they died, they'd just go on doing what it was that got them killed.

What if they died from something that wasn't their fault? For example, PK? In that case you're allowing players to hand out "punishment" to other players, for any reason they wish.

I've seen PK muds where players have spent most of their time hiding in their bases, because they were too afraid to risk the penalties associated with death. This pretty much killed off the PK aspect of the mud.

Even on your own mud there is a penalty for death, as being sent all the way back home and then having to travel back to where you were is itself a penalty.

We've found that, because of the way people view risk, a small random chance of a penalty is comparably effective to the certainty of a penalty. (At risk of derailing the thread, that's the theory behind the rl death penalty too!)

It's not really a derailment. One problem in mud games is the player being able to reasonably determine the risk of an action. The expectations in a fictional world are different, often alien to a player's experience. I think the system giving the player hints about the risks when queried (like a consider <action> command) lessens the shock of death.

Even on your own mud there is a penalty for death, as being sent all the way back home and then having to travel back to where you were is itself a penalty.

But that doesn't mean death must be a penalty. I've been considering a game where players enter the world via death - they need to escape the spiritual realm, as it were, to become corporeal. Death then, based upon how much they've done in life, sets them to certain parts of the spiritual realm. Progress might be gained through hitting these points. Perhaps one has a limited survival time in the living body (or spiritual realm before they're forced to reincarnate) and must use the other realm to gain more time to 'actually play'.

To use one of KaVir's favorite examples, just because most MUDs implement food/drink in a boring, annoying feature (in the minds of many players), does not mean food/drink are themselves boring or annoying features. Without delving into an argument over such, I'd put forth that food/drink could be implemented in fun, interesting, and even challenging ways. We can say the same of death.

Even on your own mud there is a penalty for death, as being sent all the way back home and then having to travel back to where you were is itself a penalty.

However it's not a penalty simply for the sake of being a penalty, it's just a way of stopping the victim from being killed over and over. They can generally get back to where they were in under a minute if they want to, and suffer no loss of progress (other than a little exp, if the fight was closely matched).

Even on your own mud there is a penalty for death, as being sent all the way back home and then having to travel back to where you were is itself a penalty.

However it's not a penalty simply for the sake of being a penalty, it's just a way of stopping the victim from being killed over and over. They can generally get back to where they were in under a minute if they want to, and suffer no loss of progress (other than a little exp, if the fight was closely matched).

True. And with your mud being all about PK, there's little reason to make it a more serious penalty. Some muds, however, would want people to be a lot more careful.
There are, of course, muds that want a certain type of suicidal player, so for them a harsh penalty also makes sense despite the PK.

What if they died from something that wasn't their fault? For example, PK? In that case you're allowing players to hand out "punishment" to other players, for any reason they wish.

I've seen PK muds where players have spent most of their time hiding in their bases, because they were too afraid to risk the penalties associated with death. This pretty much killed off the PK aspect of the mud.

Obviously you need to design the game mechanics of your MUD as a whole. If you're running a PK heavy game, that needs to be taken into consideration. If you're running a game geared towards cooperative PvE content, you will probably find better gameplay value out of different mechanics than a PvP MUD.

I, for one, despise games that don't have harsh death penalties. They're boring. If there is no risk, no potential loss, no fear, then there is nothing. I've played games where you can just Zerg the enemy until you win, and it's mind numbing. Sure, for a PK game, your penalties might not be loss of XP or equipment - a suitable drop in your public score could well be more than enough in a competitive environment.

Granted, I'm someone who gets all hot and bothered by roguelikes, so clearly I'm a little more hardcore about risk and loss in my games than most people. :p

The second part of the death penalty equation is how easy it is to die through no fault of the player. If the player is just out exploring and steps into a room and gets smashed by a monster 50 levels higher, that's not really fair to the player. Sure, it's realistic - and I love the idea of monster ambushes and tactics - but as a game, it's not fair to the player if he has no clear indication that he's out of his league and should leave.

That's easy to fix though. For example, simply gives areas a recommended level range, and give players a "premonition" when they enter the area based on their level. (You can do the same thing with level-less games, of course - it's just slightly more difficult.) If I step into a new area and I see:

Then you can bet your hat that I'd turn around and leave right away. If a player continues on, similar warnings might be displayed periodically (just in case the player somehow missed the first one). As there probably shouldn't be any lurking monsters at the entrance to an area (I'd even enforce that in the code), this gives the player a small safety zone in which to correct their mistake and get out of there before they can insta-killed.

For games with PK, there are various things you can do to help alleviate the problem as well. For one, characters may not be able to engage in PvP combat without first acknowledging each other or stepping into a PK area (which can show a suitable warning to the above).